Posted on March 17, 2020 at 5:14 PM

Hackers are Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Fear to Send Phishing Emails

As coronavirus keeps causing panic amongst the world’s population, there are huge shifts in business practices, social interactions, and the economy. A lot of companies are telling their workers to start working from home to reduce personal interactions. However, while the actions would reduce the spread of the virus, it leaves the door wide open for hackers to infiltrate computer networks.

Hackers designing corona-specific scams

As the world is still struggling to contain the pandemic, hackers are taking advantage of the situation to craft scams that will deceive people into believing they are getting help against the disease.

There are so many phishing scams going on right now, which is intended to trick people who are seriously looking for ways to keep themselves and their families protected from the pandemic.

They send these emails to the concerned individuals and trick them into opening the malicious PDFs, as the victims think they are receiving helpful information about the virus.

The mail reads, “Go through the attached document on safety measures regarding the spreading of coronavirus,”

The current corona-related scam going on shows how quickly hackers can take advantage of global events to perpetuate their hacking activities. They always try to adapt to current events and use them in their criminal activities.

They usually alter the subject of the original email to make sure they talk about the most urgent issues the intended victims are more likely to click on. When the victim clicks on the email or opens the PDF file, their systems are infiltrated and overwhelmed by malware. Sometime, the victims may not be aware immediately that their systems have been compromised.

Phishing mails on global events more successful

Over the years, the hackers have used various world events of very intricate issues as subject of their phishing emails, because they know most users would likely respond to such issues.

There are other hackers who send phishing emails during the tax season, claiming to have urgent information about the users’ tax returns.

However, these ones are not as successful as those whiten about global emergencies like this present one, political upsets, or natural disasters.

As these cybercriminals continue to advance their phishing methods with sophisticated tools like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, they are increasingly getting better at automating systems and designing email campaigns that will look very real. This becomes even more difficult to identify them.

Cybersecurity needs to become more advanced

Some advanced machine learning algorithms can alter the messages on massive emails without altering their grammar since they have programmed all the grammatical rules.

It makes it highly difficult for people to differentiate between a normal email and an al-crafted phishing one. That’s why some of these hackers have been able to succeed despite the widespread awareness against them.

In this case, the only way to tackle these cybercriminals is by the use of artificial Intelligence in Security

A cybersecurity system with the most updated AI is capable of detecting even the most advanced hacking activity if it’s designed with an unsupervised Generative Learning training model. Many of the cybersecurity models in the market, based in AI, generally use Second Wave AI or supervised learning to detect breaches.

But the supervised AI model will not be able to detect something it has not been programmed to detect since it wasn’t programmed to detect how something unusual looks like.

On the other hand, the unsupervised learning model has been programmed to study the network, while fully understanding all the areas in the network and detecting an abnormal network behavior. It even studies how the network should be a few minutes into the future.

With this type of cybersecurity, the AI model can easily detect an abnormality in the network because it knows when something is wrong. With such an approach, cyber researchers are saying that it could be used to stop cybercriminals with highly sophisticated phishing and hacking tools.